On the manifestos killers leave behind • Hacker News Board

Post by fit2rule » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:21 AM UTC

comrh wrote: post #55

VT_Drew wrote: post #30

From your first paragraph: >‘I have noticed,’ it says, ‘that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the…

I have no idea why this is controversial. The previous day's Gladwell article even comes to the same conclusion as most that notoriety and coverage are major factor in these types of attacks.

I think the reason its controversial is that, with such a law enacted, oppressive governments can keep the revolutionaries in their boxes. Sometimes, you need to know the name of the revolutionaries. For example, with this "memory hole" policy, would we have ever known who these folks were, and what they were fighting for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_revolutionar...

Or is violent revolution simply not ever going to be acceptable any more because the fact of the application of violent force aspect has been usurped by the mentally insane? Are all violent revolutionaries insane, then? (Hint: no, of course not... unless you're the state they're attempting to violently overthrow, in which case you've got your "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, State-Sponsored Edition" at hand, ready for just such a circumstance ..)

(Note: I am not saying we should worship these insane gun-toting school shooters as revolutionaries - but I am saying that we are on a very slippery slope if we're going to whiteout violent revolutionaries from history, future and past. Revolutions don't happen if you don't have a figurehead to get them started.)